


and this our life, exempt

by Casylum



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Fiber Arts, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:41:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21843853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Casylum/pseuds/Casylum
Summary: Sammy knits. Actually, that's wrong. Jack knits. Sammy's just there to finish what he left behind.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 36
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	and this our life, exempt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MightyGlowCloud](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MightyGlowCloud/gifts).



> written for Yuletide 2019
>
>> And this our life exempt from public haunt  
>  Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,  
>  Sermons in stones and good in every thing.  
>  I would not change it.
> 
> —Shakespeare's _As You Like It_ , Act II, scene i 

Sammy Stevens has known Jack and Lily Wright as long as he can remember, which might be why, when he's staring at the open door of Jack's empty car, engine still running, he doesn't notice the color start to leach from the edges of his vision. By the time he does notice, it's too late: the world is saturated in a thick, improbable grey, and he's alone in a police station, hand tight on his phone, trying to work up the energy to call Lily and let her know her brother's gone.

When he does call, after spending way too long trying to remember whether CALL was on the right or the left, he blurts out the whole situation in one long rush. The line's silent for a full minute after he's finished before Lily quietly says, "Where. Are you."

~~~

He handles Jack's disappearance and the ensuing investigation...badly, he can admit that. 

Later. 

At the time, he's too busy throwing most of his frustration into the Shotgun Sammy persona he and Jack had so carefully built up, as if maybe, somehow, by being so perfect and infuriating an asshole, he'd pull Jack back towards him, cause him to storm into the studio after a particularly chauvinist comment and ask Sammy just what the fuck he thought he was doing.

The rest goes to Lily. They've always been tense, the edges of their friendship sharper than his and Jack's, but his absence rips away their thin layer of civility and dumps them straight into clawing at wounds they're both mad they can't fix.

That snapping meanness spikes through the grey fog he feels like he's moving through, kicks him in the ass with the fact that he has feelings, that he's angry. At himself, yeah, and Lily, but also, irrationally, at Jack. They'd gone into this business together, they'd billed themselves as a pair, and now Sammy's not only physically alone, but is acting out a fucking Bill Withers song every time he runs a red light.

The fifth time that happens, he admits that maybe, just maybe, he should talk to someone about it.

~~~

His doctor says it's psychosomatic. The guys back at the satellite station say it's something crude enough he never wants to hear it again, let alone think it. 

Lily doesn't say anything.

Of course, he'd have to talk to Lily for her to have the chance to say anything, and he got the hell out as soon as the police had stopped giving him tight smiles and reminders to "stay in town". 

He'd been willing to go anywhere he hadn't been before, which puts When he gets to King Falls, a little dot in the middle of nowhere on only half the maps he's consulted on this journey, he doesn't even mention that his vision has gone all Pleasantville, just dives right into the banality of late-night AM radio like he's fixing to drown in it.

It's not like he was surprised, exactly, when it happened?

Clearly not enough to feel like it was something he needed to get a medical opinion for. His mom's side of the family has a history of it, ranging from red/green to the more extreme black and white. 

So, he reasons, staring at a pixelated grey wash that Google Maps claims is King Falls, it's probably not that he's lost the ability to see color without Jack there, more like he gained it when he was there. 

Or something. 

Whatever. Semantics don't change the fact that he has to relearn how to drive, study the sometimes minute differences in shades of grey, and generally be forcefully reminded every time he blinks just what he's lost, what he's missing.

Which also means, by the time Tim Jenson's been carried away by the—according to Ben—rainbow lights, Sammy's deep enough in it not to think about mentioning it at all.

~~~

He lets Ben run the board.

Well, "let" is a strong word, one that implies he has any say in how Ben Arnold operates, but that's what he tells himself. It's not because Ben has a 20 page schedule for every night, single-spaced and stapled together, or because Sammy can't tell the difference between the red lights of incoming calls and the green of on-air, it's because Sammy lets him. 

Right.

It also, he tells himself, staring into the mirror in the station bathroom, has nothing to do with the fact that every time Ben asks him if he's checked his e-mail he feels a crawling sense of dread shaped like police summons and the few people from the satellite station who haven't fully ditched him.

So he lets him run the board. It's a deal, even though Ben doesn't know about it.

~~~

After year or so into his stay in King Falls, Sammy Stevens has become a parody of himself: the long hair is longer and pulled back with a real hair tie, the shirts are baggier and more threadbare, and he's started knitting again. 

Well, again is a strong word for it; all previous attempts had been made shoved up against Jack's side on their too small sofa, or on the floor in the Wright family basement as Jack and Lily bickered above him, small little scraps of things that got unraveled instantly, made only to occupy his hands or get Lily to talk without talking. 

Anyway.

It's just a few, small projects to start: rough squares for hot things, a shapeless lump he's calling a tea cozy, the list goes on, even if none of them ever involve more than one color, a lazy way of trying to avoid the discussion that'd inevitably occur the minute he tried to put grey and grey together and ended up with orange and lime green. 

It wasn't a difficult hobby to pick up: he already had the yarn, piles of it from his and Jack's house, stuffed away in different boxes. He'd used as packing material in some cases, but mostly, he admits to himself, he was trying to hide it.

There's a bag that stays in the back of the closet, though, one with a bright, obnoxious print that Sammy recognizes from one of Lily's old summer dresses and a tangle of half-done...somethings stuffed inside that he can barely look at.

It stays, and he fiddles around with needles, crochet hooks, different yarn weights, and intriguing ideas about how things should stay together. It stays and it stays.

Until it doesn't.

~~~

When Sammy first dropped into King Falls, a tight-lipped whirlwind of big city attitude and insistent disbelief, Ben honestly thought he'd be gone in a week, tops. Maybe a month, if Merv was feeling combative. That's why he dragged Ben on-air, right? For continuity or whatever after he skipped town, back to whatever he was running to or running from.

Instead, more than a year later, he's sitting on Ben's couch, surrounded by what looks like an entire craft store.

"What are you—is that yarn?," he asks, stepping away from the doorway, "Where did you get yarn?"

"I had it," Sammy replies absently, digging through a bag printed with a violently floral pattern that almost seems to be reaching for him from the fabric.

Ben's eyebrows raise. "You...had this. When you moved into my place. With three, relatively small boxes. You had—" he gestures, indicating the explosion of synthetic wool "—all this and room for no less than five Traveling Wilburys t-shirts from tours that ended before you were even born?"

"Um," Sammy says, the single syllable drawn out, "this wasn't in the boxes I moved in with, no."

"So where did it come from?" Ben asks, arms flinging outward and his coffee almost following. He manages to save it, sliding with gravity and nearly tripping over his own feet.

Sammy shrugs, very carefully not looking at Ben. "You know. Home."

"Home?" Ben picks his way closer, doing his best not to snag anything. "A different home from...here?"

"Yup," Sammy says, and Ben waits for him to continue. He doesn't.

Well then.

~~~

Jack had been making...Sammy doesn't even fucking know what. 

A blob? A tangle of knots and chains that dared to call itself a pattern? 

He puts that one back, and rummages around some more until he finds a pile of tightly stitched squares, each about four inches across. The greys shade subtly in a radiating pattern on some, stand out in giant chunks on others, and overall make Sammy's head hurt. 

But the construction—a continuous stretch of double-treble and chain stitches, according to the internet—that he thinks he can manage. It's similar enough to the granny squares he's been twisting together, if maybe a bit more complicated.

Which he can totally do. Totally. If he can match the yarns.

Maybe he can ask Emily?

~~~

Emily is busy, what with the disappearance, multiple destructions of her place of business, and the actual work of running a small town library. Which leaves—

"Lily." He finds her sitting on the couch in the station's breakroom, squinting at a PC monitor and angrily clicking her way through what Merv claims are HR refreshers but look a lot like adverts for car salesmen interspersed with solemn looking sweaty people imploring her not to grope her co-workers.

"Can it, Stevens," she growls, clicking particularly forcefully on a large red button. "I'm not in the mood."

"You're never in the mood," Sammy points out as he takes the opportunity to angle the door more shut than not, his—Jack's—project bag hanging from his hand.

"And yet you still keep coming around," she snaps. "Take a hint, Shotgun."

He sighs. "Lily, please."

"Fine, what," she says flatly, finally looking up at him. Her eyes are red-rimmed from lack of sleep and her face has the pinched look that means she hasn't eaten anything but bar crackers and Ben's secret snack stash for far too long.

"I need your help," Sammy says simply.

Lily snorts. "With what, conditioning?" She waves at the general direction of his head. "If you're going to torture us all with that the least you can do is clean it properly."

"What? No. Lily, come on." Sammy's getting exasperated now, running through the list of people he knows who don't hate him and can probably knit. It's depressingly short on both sides, and the overlap is even smaller. Cecil's on it, which is entirely emblematic of how desperate he is at this point

"Okay, okay," Lily says, pushing back from the computer screen to stand straight, the bones of her back cracking down in a line. "What can I do?

Sammy raises the project bag a bit sheepishly, and shows Lily the pre-rolled lumps of yarn inside. "Can you...can you tell me which of these match?"

"Stevens, I swear, if this is because I'm a woman—" No one's ever done zero to scathing in sixty seconds quite like Lily Wright, Sammy thinks, almost fondly, before remembering that he's asking for help, not to be chewed out.

"No, Lily, god," Sammy says, and he's losing control of his voice, there's a wobble in there he didn't anticipate, but he barrels on anyway. "They're Jack's, okay? They're Jack's and I want to finish the things he was making with them but I can't because I can't tell the differences between the fucking yarns, alright?"

"Sammy..." Lily says, and her face is working like it's trying to remember what contrite is and whether or not she agrees with it.

"Can you help or not?" It's Sammy's turn to snap, and the vitriol feels familiar, almost comforting. This is what he and Lily do, now.

"I can, I'd love to," Lily says slowly, almost delicately, "but...Sammy, why do you need me to? Why can't you—"

"Do it myself?" Sammy laughs shortly, an explosion of self-deprecating sound. "I told you, I can't see the difference."

"Between fuschia and puce," Lily says flatly.

"Between grey and grey and maybe a little bit of a lighter grey," Sammy says harshly before shutting up. He knows Lily is confused, can see it on her face, memories of childhood painting and adult arguments over apartment decorations clashing with what's being presenting to her now.

"Sammy..." she starts, and Sammy cuts her off with a sharp shake of his head.

"Don't ask, Lily, because I don't know. Just...help me. Please.

"Alright," Lily says softly, "Alright." 

~~~

Oh, wow, is the first thing Ben thinks after walking into the station on Friday, followed by God, that's ugly.

"Is it supposed to be that color?" he blurts out without thinking.

"Yup," Sammy says, and he sounds...far more pleased than he really should after confirming that the spread of twisting brown, black, green, and yellow lines tangling across the fabric forming under his hands and piling over his side of the board is deliberate, rather than some tragic mistake.

"Are you..sure?" Ben asks dubiously as he settles into his seat, pushing cautiously at a bit of Sammy's creation that's crept across the divide.

"Yep," Sammy says again, and that's it.

~~~

It's a tree, when it's done. A big, old, ugly tree, with gnarled limbs and bumpy roots grasping its way across a blanket that stretches the full length of Sammy's bed, with only a scrap of lighter grey—Lily says it's a light, dirty blue—visible at the edges, barely caught by the snarl of branches.

Sammy doesn't recognize it, doesn't know where Jack got the pattern for it, and doesn't quite know why he was making it, but. It keeps him warm.

**Author's Note:**

> written for the prompts of "colorblind" and "the author has spent far too much time squinting at crochet videos recently, pity them"
> 
> a note on colorblindness: full colorblindness (i.e. black-and-white) is extremely rare, & is mostly used here for the purposes of Narrative Drama


End file.
